Blue Movies

The memoir in the March Harper’s by the New York City police detective Edward Conlon (who has written in The New Yorker as Marcus Laffey) about the intersection of his work in law enforcement and his literary work (he’s the author of the nonfiction book “Blue Blood,” and a forthcoming novel) offers several anecdotes of cinematic significance, including a view of the real-life police drama that the director James Gray experienced with Conlon’s partner when doing research for “We Own the Night,” and a tale of the transformation of “Blue Blood” into a TV pilot under the direction of Brett Ratner. (The show wasn’t picked up, but, on the basis of Conlon’s description, I’d like to see the pilot emerge on DVD.) But the most striking of them arrives by ricochet from Conlon’s response to a question from his editor about his novel:

“Is this a character piece?”

“Yes,” I answered. In truth, I didn’t know what she meant. It had characters, didn’t it? Now, I understand the term better in comparison with “plot-driven”; my editor was asking whether interior attributes or exterior structures—relationships, narrative conventions—control the action. It was a miniature of the progressive-conservative debate on crime, individual choices versus societal forces, and it was no better resolved.

It’s a fascinating way of seeing the political implications of a story’s conception. In Conlon’s analogy, the conservative view of personal responsibility corresponds to the character-driven story, the progressive one of societal forces corresponds to the plot-driven model. In fact, I think that the opposite is the case—that liberal films tend to be character-driven, whereas conservative views are reinforced by plot-driven stories. In an earlier post, I suggested as much, somewhat allusively; it’s worthwhile to be more explicit about it, because the dichotomy is at the heart of the way things are done in Hollywood.

Nowadays, even the plot-driven story tends to have a key character-centric element: backstory. The recognition on the part of producers and screenwriters that what gives a plot an emotional engine is a character’s personal quest—and that this quest has to do with his or her otherwise-hidden longtime inner need—is an essentially democratic (small-d) perspective, and a liberal one, but one that’s liberal in a particular, and politically significant, way. What backstory provides, and what makes it liberal, is the idea of the exception.

The traditional plot-driven story defines a character in terms of social function or type. In the kind of story Conlon refers to—crime stories—societal factors can cut both ways: they exonerate a criminal because of mitigating conditions, such as poverty or ethnic or racial discrimination; or they can define crime rigidly, in terms of its social definition, the breaking of the law, and make no allowance for mitigating circumstances. In either case, individual distinctions are left out, and the political implications are hard-line, whether of the left or the right. And such stories draw a line in the sand, dividing the audience between those who accept such categories as legitimate exceptions or justifications and those who don’t.

By contrast, looking to explain and justify action by means of backstory—that is, in terms of a person’s private life—is a liberal thing to do. It’s an acknowledgment that the social, political, and legal importance of the private realm in the public one (thus tending to efface the distinction—also a major aspect of liberalism). Moreover, this notion is one that tends toward consensus, because conservatives too are likely to accept the paramount value of the individual. (It also increases the potential audience.) Backstory offers a sort of narrative and juridical jiu-jitsu that relies on conservative values to assert liberal ends; and it’s why the notion of Hollywood as an engine of liberalism is utterly apt—as long as that liberalism is aptly defined and understood.